Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Jeanne Young met Spence in 1897 when she was barely 30 and Miss Spence was
seventy-one. She, like several other friends of Spence’s old age, sought her friendship
because she admired Miss Spence and her work and wished to share it. 43 A few
months after making her acquaintance, Jeanne Young suggested that Spence should
offer herself as a candidate for election to the 1897 Federal Convention:
‘My dear’, she protested, ‘I fear that I am too old’. I laughed. ‘Curiously
enough, we all regard you just as one of us. The only difference is, that
while we are young and inexperienced, you have had years of experience,
and you have the knowledge of men and things which we younger ones
still lack’ 44
As this suggests, there was, in their friendship, something of the relationship between
teacher and disciple. Jeanne Young acknowledged it indirectly when she wrote
‘Had my tastes been merely literary or social, Miss Spence would assuredly have
found nothing to bind us together. It was the combination of these, with my deep
interest in public affairs that welded the links in our chain of friendship.’ 45 Yet her
admiration and her proselytism did not prevent her offering a clear-eyed portrait of
her mentor.
Catherine Spence could be aggressive, self-important, tactless and intolerant.
She ‘resented most intensely the modern tendency to drift into “weak fashionable
expressions” – as she termed them – such as “nightie”, “comfy”, and “handky” ’;
she was so ready to take someone to task for the supposed use of vulgarism of the
day that she severely admonished a speaker for using the expression ‘somebody was
poorly’, only to discover that he had actually said ‘somebody was poorly clad’. She
attacked manners she disliked:
being asked by an official of a Board, of which she was a member to autograph
a book she had written … she did so very pleasantly, but when
having extended to another official the offer to do his copy also, she was
met with the quasi-condescending reply, ‘I don’t mind if you do’, she lost
patience, and said imperatively [sic], ‘Do you want me to sign it, or do
you not?’
Sometimes her assertiveness proved useful. At a meeting, a member of parliament
asked her ‘a little offensively, – “Miss Spence, what do you and Mrs Young get out of
this?” “Get”, she said scornfully, “we get all that is left over after lecturing for noth-
14